Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Last time on our
adventures in Tamriel, Shush’Ogar learned the subtleties of armor repair; took
a treasure hunting job from a man whose hair could house several families of bird; and delivered a sacred artifact to
someone in exchange for an important mission he didn’t really listen to. He
then took a boat to the coast to continue his quest. This is arguably cheating
because moving boats don’t actually exist in this game, but so what it’s a
metaphor for fast travel shut up. Having successfully snuck that one by you,
I’m going to get back to Shush before you take issue with it.

It took about a day for Shush to get to de coast city. When de boat got
close to de town, Shush saw dere was a guard waiting for dem. When de boat wot
Shush took hit land Shush got up, scratched his arm and walked up to de guard
guy.

“Greetings citizen, welcome to Anvil. Can I offer you any directions?”

“Uh...did you say Anvil?”

The city of Anvil,
where Shush was definitely probably supposed to go.

Shush stepped outta de shop feelin pretty gud about all de sellin stuff
he did. Shush were gettin lotsa shiny gold pieces for all de glowy stones he
found. Shush wasn’t sure what to do wit all de gold doe. Den Shush had an idea.
Cause see Shush’s clanky clothes got all banged up from all de skeletons an
stuff, an it was real uncomfortable. So Shush found a buildin wit a picture of
clanky clothes on it, an he went inside.

The shop in question,
notable for looking exactly like every other shop in the imperial city.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Last time we left our
supposedly sneaky orc Shush’Ogar, he had stumbled out of jail, collected
skulls, stumbled out of goblin caves, witnessed the assassination of an
emperor, and stumbled out of a sewer. The moment when you walk out from the
tutorial into the light of a wide-open world to explore is always great in
Bethesda games. An interesting thing to note about Oblivion is that though you
can go anywhere and do as you like at this point, the game starts you off
pointed straight at a dungeon. Specifically, an ancient ruin named Vilverin.

There’s a sleeping
bandit right out of view behind the wall. I know this dungeon uncomfortably
well.

This dungeon was one of
the first things I experienced playing an Elder Scrolls game, and I wager the
same was true for many others. It’s a good introductory dungeon too, as it has
a fair bit of variety and can make you an obscene amount of money for a level
one character. As such, it’s been an unofficial tradition of mine to plunder
the place as my first independent act with new characters. Now dungeons can be
kind of same-y and lacking in unique commentary, so we’ll skip or summarize
some in this play-through. But for at least this first one, I’ll make an
exception.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

NOTE: This post is a game design interlude not directly connected to my
written Let’s Play of Oblivion. If you don’t care about this sort of thing, you
can skip it. But if you like painfully detailed discussions of in-game
mechanics, gosh golly gee are you in for a treat.

So before we continue the
adventures of Shush’Ogar, there’s something I need to address. In the first
episode of this series, as well as future episodes, I’m trying to mix in
discussions of game design along with humorous play-by-plays. This is all well
and good for most things, as Oblivion has a lot of weird and
amusing quirks to it. However, there is one subject in Oblivion that is too
massive an issue. There’s one giant, messy problem with the game that I want to
dedicate an entire post to properly
discuss. This one thing, this near fatal flaw is my biggest issue with
Oblivion. It bolsters many of the lesser problems in the game and is the number
one reason I can't consider Oblivion the best Elder Scrolls game. So
what could this flaw possibly be?